Bear laughed without humor. “Look around this place, McKay. You don’t have enough men to form a decent-sized posse, let alone a militia.”
“The mule skinners might be persuaded to stay,” McKay suggested, plainly irritated at Bear doubting him.
Luke shook his head. “Not us. We’ve had our fill of Apaches. After we see this boy buried decent, we’re moving on.”
“Then we’ll have to make do with the men we have, that’s all,” McKay said. He turned to McBride. “I’ll see you at the meeting.”
After the storekeeper was gone, Bear said, “I don’t like that man.”
“I don’t much like him either,” McBride said. “But right now I need him.”
The wounded boy began to groan, clutching at his belly, his lips white with pain. Bear slipped the youngster’s suspenders off his thin shoulders and lowered his pants. The wound was a nightmare, a ragged bullet hole so large the intestines were coiling out of it.
McBride heard Bear’s sharp intake of breath and realized the boy was beyond saving.
The old scout lifted bleak eyes to Luke. “In about another fifteen minutes or so, he’ll start screaming. The pain will be bad, beyond anything he has ever imagined, and it could last for hours, maybe days.” He hesitated. “Luke, you’re the nearest thing to kinfolk he has.”
Luke had seen the wound and he knew he was being asked a question. McBride saw the man’s inward struggle and felt his pain. The mule skinner was a hard, uncompromising man and the life he led was one of backbreaking labor, few comforts and little joy. But even he was hesitant to make the final decision.
As it happened, the dying boy made up his mind for him. Brave as he was, he could no longer dam up the floodtide waves of pain that swept over him. As Bear had predicted, he shrieked in agony, a primal scream that turned every head in the room in his direction. And he kept on screaming.
The eyes of Luke and Bear met. The mule skinner swallowed hard, and nodded.
Bear drew his Colt and looked down at the youngster. Somehow the boy knew and he nodded, even struggling to form words he could not speak. Bear’s brown, gnarled hand gently moved from the boy’s sweating forehead, over his eyes, closing them.
Quickly he shoved the muzzle of his gun into the center of the youngster’s chest and pulled the trigger.
The kid’s last scream provided a fearsome counterpoint to the reverberating roar of the revolver, echoes of both chasing each other around the sudden, singing silence of the room.
Bear peered at the boy through a moving mist of powder smoke. “He’s gone,” he said quietly.
Over at the bar the fat ladies were sobbing and the eyes of every mule skinner were on Bear, neither angry nor accusing. To a man they knew he’d done what had to be done and they would not hold it against him.
McBride’s ears were ringing from the closeness of the gunshot. Back in New York, just a few short months ago, he would have arrested Bear Miller for murder. That he understood and approved what the man had done was a fair indication of how far he had come.
This was not the city; it was the West, and out here how you took the measure of a man and judged his actions were very different.
McBride placed a hand on Bear’s shoulder and squeezed, letting him know.
Chapter 16
A dozen men and two women were gathered in the back room of McKay’s store when John McBride stepped inside. It was cold out and the sleet, driven by a blustering wind, had hardened into pellets of ice that stung the face and made breathing difficult.
A potbellied stove glowed cherry red in one corner of the room and as McKay made his introductions, McBride was grateful for its cozy warmth. A coffeepot bubbled on the stove, filling the room with its fragrance, and someone had brought a huge platter of doughnuts.
“Are the bone pickers gone?” Jed McKay asked him.
“Yes, they left an hour ago.”
The storekeeper looked shocked. “They buried the dead boy already?”
“No, they took him with them. They said the youngster wouldn’t rest easy near a town called Suicide, so they’ll look for a likely spot on the prairie.”
“Just as well,” McKay said. “We don’t need strangers buried here.”
The women were using the only chairs in the room and McBride took a seat on an empty wooden crate. He accepted a cup of coffee and a doughnut from one of the women, who had been introduced to him as Mrs. Whitehead. Then he gave his attention to McKay, who was clearing his throat.
“I’ve called you all here tonight—”
“McKay, talk about the death of Manuel Cortez.” The interruption came from John Wright, the town carpenter. He was a tall, string bean of a man with a droopy mustache and sad, hound-dog eyes.
“That matter is on the agenda for later, John,” McKay said, irritated.
“Discuss it now,” Wright said. “Cortez was an original, just as we all are here.” The brown eyes moved to McBride, vaguely hostile. “Except for him.”
“Later, John,” McKay snapped, his annoyance growing. “We’ll talk about Cortez later.”
As though he hadn’t heard, Wright said, “Sam Weiss, Charlie Hodges, Joe Beckwith, Slim Peacock, his wife Betty and their three youngsters, Dave Whipple and now Manuel Cortez. Every one of them an original and all of them murdered as they tried to leave Suicide.”
The brewer Conrad Heber, a German with a round, pleasant face, massive belly and tree trunk legs, got to his feet, wheezing as he faced Wright. “John, my friend, it was the Apaches who killed poor Manuel.” He turned his head to McBride. “That man found his body. Ask him who killed Herr Cortez.”
Without further prompting, McBride said, “It could have been Apaches. Or it could have been person or persons unknown. Cortez was shot with a .50-caliber rifle and robbed. So far, that’s all I know.”
“So far?” Wright jumped on that. “What do you mean, so far? Are you investigating Cortez’s death?”
“Of course he’s not,” McKay interrupted. “He happened to find the man’s body. That’s all.”
McBride ignored the storekeeper and said to Wright, “You could say I’m investigating this so-called rule that no one can leave Suicide.”
“That doesn’t apply to you, McBride.” It was Nathan Levy, small, plump and dark-eyed. “All the people who have been killed so far have been originals.”
“What does that mean—originals?”
“It means the original settlers who accepted Tam Elliot’s invitation to start a town here.” Wright was answering for Levy. “Only it wasn’t Suicide then—it was called Eden Creek. Suicide came later, after Elliot shot himself.”
“Who changed the name?” McBride asked. “Surely not you originals?”
“Miss Elliot give it that name,” Wright said, his face stiff. “She threatened to foreclose on all our businesses if we didn’t accept it.”
“What’s in a name?” Jed McKay said. “Maybe by this time Miss Elliot has gotten over the death of her father and will let us change it back to Eden Creek.”
“Who’s going to ask her, McKay? You?” Wright asked belligerently.
“I’ll ask her,” McBride volunteered, mildly surprising even himself. “I have a vested interest in this town, and calling the place Suicide is bad for business.”
Every eye in the room was turned to McBride, puzzled, trying to figure him out. “I’ve been invited to Miss Elliot’s home for dinner tomorrow evening,” he explained. “I’ll ask her then.”
“No one in this town has ever been invited to Miss Elliot’s home,” Wright said. “No one that is except the damned Poison Dwarf.”
“Is Drago an original?” McBride asked, brushing doughnut crumbs off his mustache with the back of his hand.
“No, he came later. Not much later, but later.”
“Then there’s your answer. I’m not an original either.”
But McBride was confused. What common ground could the beautiful, rich and presumably sophisticated Allison Elliot share w
ith a homicidal dwarf who had the disposition of a wounded rattlesnake? Maybe he’d discover the solution to that and other questions tomorrow evening….
Suddenly he became aware that John Wright was talking again.
“…I’m through, McKay. I’m loading up and pulling out. I’ve had enough of Suicide to last me a lifetime.”
“Don’t be hasty, John,” McKay said. “Things are going to change around here, I promise.”
But the carpenter refused to be appeased and now he was addressing the entire meeting. “Look at us. We’re terrified to leave this place. This isn’t a town, it’s a corner of hell. Where are the children? How can you have a town without children? You women, Mrs. Whitehead, my wife Ann, why are there no children?”
Ann Wright was a slender, careworn woman with frightened brown eyes that seemed too large for her face. She twisted a small lace handkerchief in her white-knuckled hands. “John…please…not now.”
“Tell them, Ann,” Wright went on remorselessly. “Tell them how you refused to bring a child into the world that would be trapped forever in Suicide. And you, Mrs. Whitehead, didn’t you have that same reason?”
Tall, thin, with an almost pretty oval face and black hair drawn back into a harsh bun, Joan Whitehead nodded, her eyes moist. “Yes, that was my reason, that and the deaths of the Peacock children.” She hesitated as though trying to bolster her courage for what she had to say next. “I remembered them, all three of those children. Robert, aged nine, Marcia, aged six, little Virginia, just eighteen months. They weren’t shot like their parents. Their throats were cut.”
McBride saw something terrible in Joan Whitehead’s eyes. The pale shadow of a dawning madness. “We all know who made the rule, who ordered the deaths of so many. And we all know that for some reason she wants to punish us.” She pointed a bony forefinger in the direction of the house on the hill. “Allison Elliot, that vile she-devil, that witch, won’t be content until all of us are dead.”
A stunned hush followed Mrs. Whitehead’s accusation, punctuated only by her soft sobs as she buried her face in her hands. Her blacksmith husband, a man almost as big in the shoulders and chest as McBride, led her back to her seat, uttering soothing words in a language that was all his own.
Wright, his face black with anger, jumped to his feet. “I say we all leave, every man jack of us. The witch can’t kill us all.”
“No!”
Adam Whitehead was standing tall and terrible, one huge hand on his wife’s shoulder. With his beetling eyebrows and long black beard he had the wild look of an Old Testament prophet. “Listen to me! We burn the witch. Now. Tonight. And we hang her evil familiars, the black Goliath and the hunched dwarf.”
Most of the people cheered, a few even yelling, “Burn the witch!” But others, notably Nathan Levy and Conrad Heber, looked horrified.
The meeting was getting out of hand and McBride rose to his feet. Wright’s idea of a mass exodus from Suicide would ruin him and he would not even consider Whitehead’s mad plan. If he had to, he’d stop it.
But McKay waved at McBride to stay where he was and yelled, “Order! Order everybody! Listen, Miss Elliot harms no one except those who would rob her. She is in perpetual mourning for her dead father, no more than that. Listen to reason. She lives with grief and has no evil intent toward any of us.”
“Then who is behind the rule, Herr McKay?” Heber asked.
“I don’t know, but there is a man among us who could find out.” Everybody looked at McBride as McKay continued, “The reason I called this meeting tonight was to offer Mr. McBride this”—he put his hand in his pocket and, with a dramatic flourish, produced a small silver shield—“the town marshal’s badge.”
That statement was met with another flat silence.
“But we don’t even know the man!” This came from a pale figure in a black frock coat who had not spoken before.
“I know him, or at least I know of him,” McKay said. “He’s the new proprietor of the El Coyote Azul and he’s good with a gun.”
“Who says? He says?” the frock-coated man asked, smirking as he looked McBride up and down.
“He’s the man who killed Hack Burns,” McKay said, a hint of malice in his eyes. “Does that tell you something, Channing?”
It told Dave Channing plenty and it showed in his suddenly slack jaw and shocked eyes, but now he tried to salvage his composure. “He’d have to prove that to me.”
“He doesn’t have to prove anything to you,” McKay snapped. “You’re a professional gambler, Channing. You neither reap nor sow. Strictly speaking you shouldn’t even be here tonight.”
“I can leave anytime you say,” Channing said. He brushed his coat away from the handle of the Colt in his waistband. “Just be real careful how you say it.”
“I’ve got something to say.” McBride rose to his feet. “I don’t want the job.”
McKay smiled and nodded. “I thought that would be your response.” He waved a hand around the room. “You’ve heard these people tonight. If they all leave, you’ll be out of business. If they become a lynch mob and burn Miss Elliot’s home, the law will come down on us, the outlaws on the dodge will avoid us and for all intents and purposes our town will cease to exist. Either way, Mr. McBride, you will be the loser.”
Feeling trapped, McBride asked, “If I pin on the badge, what am I expected to do?”
“Nothing much. Just run undesirables out of town and preserve the peace.”
“And preserving the peace means finding out who is behind the rule?”
“Yes, that’s part of it. The most important part, I suppose.”
“Then I’ll wear the badge,” McBride said. “But only until I discover who the murderer is.”
“Better not take too long, McBride,” Adam Whitehead said. “I propose we give this man five days to find out who killed Cortez and the others. If he doesn’t, then we burn the Elliot witch and hang her familiars.”
A majority wildly cheered this statement. McKay looked at McBride and said wryly, “You heard them. You’ve got five days, Marshal.”
The gambler Dave Channing stepped closer to McBride. “Where’s your gun”—he smiled like a coiled snake—“Marshal?”
“I don’t need a gun.”
Channing struck a pose, his thumbs in his gun belt. “One time I knew a town marshal who said that very thing. A week later they cut off his head and paraded it around town on a pole.”
“That won’t happen here,” McKay said quickly.
And just as quickly he handed McBride the badge.
Chapter 17
Compared to the ornate gold shield he’d worn in New York, the badge of the town marshal of Suicide was a crude piece of work. Tinned iron, McBride guessed, and it read, misspelled, SHERRIF, not MARSHAL.
He pinned the badge to his shirt, making him the only lawman in maybe twenty miles in all directions—an acting, unpaid lawman at that.
Watching him, Bear Miller was not impressed.
“All you’ve done is make yourself a target for every outlaw passing through,” he said, talking around a mouthful of beef and beans. “And if Miss Elliot is behind the killing of the originals, she won’t let you go poking your nose into her business.”
They sat at a table in the cantina. Earlier McBride had told Bear what had been said at last night’s meeting.
“Miss Elliot didn’t make the rule,” he said. He spooned sugar into his coffee. “It has to be somebody else, somebody here in town who has his own agenda.”
“Agenda? What kind of agenda would that be?”
“I don’t know,” McBride admitted. “The whole thing doesn’t make any sense.”
Bear jabbed his fork at the badge on McBride’s shirt. “Neither does that.”
“It’s only for five days. If I can’t find out who is behind the rule, I’ll be free of it.”
“Wear your gun, John.”
McBride shook his head. “This will be detective work. I don’t need a gun for sl
euthing.”
“Wear your gun.”
“You worry too much, Bear.”
“I heard something yesterday. One of the mule skinners told it to me. I didn’t want to worry you since you’ve already got you hands full with Angel Guerrero, but when I came in here and saw you wearing that badge I figured you might as well know.”
“Know what?” McBride sipped his coffee, only half-interested, sizing up the possible take from the three breakfasters in the cantina. There were four, if he counted Bear, but Bear never paid for anything.
The old scout took a deep breath. “Roddy Rentzin has left the Brazos River country. The Texas Rangers are really worked up, talking on the wires to any tin-star lawmen who’ll listen. I hear they’re telling them to look out for Rentzin and to step around him if they can.” Bear’s eyes were anxious. “John, the mule skinner told me a drifter up from Texas told him the latest word is that Rentzin is headed in this direction.”
McBride laughed and laid his cup on the table. “Bear, what in hell are you talking about? And who is Roddy Rentzin? An outlaw?”
“No, he’s worse—a gun-slick kid on the prod. He has three gunfighting brothers and he wants to prove himself faster than any of them. Right now he’s trying to build himself a rep. A few months ago he took a big step in that direction when he gunned Frank Bishop. I knew Bishop and he was a hard man who’d killed way more’n his share.”
Bear laid down his fork and pushed his plate away. “John, word gets around fast because of the talking wire and the railroads that folks seem to ride all the time. You don’t suppose Rentzin has been told that the man who killed Hack Burns is right here in Suicide and he’s on his way?”
McBride was amused and it showed in his eyes. “Now how would Rentzin know that? Nobody knows I’m here.”
“Is that a fact?” Bear glanced around the room, his eyes lingering on each diner for a moment. Then he leaned forward in his chair and whispered, “John, you’re a named man. You came south from the Picketwire country, looking to buy a hardware store. Did you give your name to anybody?”
Shadow of the Gun Page 10